I'm not sure how exactly ChatGPT uses its own responses in the context, but I've found that it can ignore the instructions you've made it repeat over and over, even though it just did it successfully in the last response. I've had better results making it produce something to paste in my next prompt.

Relatedly, when editing past prompts, I've found that it sometimes reuses things that were in the original branch of the conversation, even though they're not in the logical flow of the current conversation.